A few weeks ago my son Damien got in an altercation with his best friend at school. An argument escalated, things got physical and Damien got hurt. I received a cryptic email from the art teacher informing me that Damien had been involved in « an incident » that I may want to « discuss » with him. Leaving incidents to be « discussed » with a neuro-divergent child with a significant language delay is an adventure, let me tell you! Details of increasing troublesomeness emerge one-by-one in succeeding bedtime chats — drip, drip, drip — so that by the time you get the full picture, the window to intervene meaningfully is long gone.
Last fall, a kid cut Damien’s hair in class and we received a similar note. Anatomically-speaking, I find “hair” is uncomfortably close to '“eyes” when it comes to scissors but I wasn’t otherwise concerned. Until I had the chance to “discuss” the incident with my child.
I learned over the next week or so that a classmate had been carrying a ziplock bag they called “the evidence bag”. Damien had refused to provide hair as evidence so his classmate punched him in the gut hard enough to make him double over and chopped a chunk of his hair. The note from the teacher was appreciated but it inspired more questions than it answered.
“So what happened then?” I asked Damien.
“She went to the office. That part was satisfying.”
Oooookay.
The practice of keeping the details of disciplinary interventions private is necessary under the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (MFIPPA), which sets out the rules that schools must follow regarding the collection, use, retention and disclosure of personal information. Students names and school records — which include academic and disciplinary records — are protected under privacy laws.
Protection of private information notwithstanding, withholding details about incident management when communicating with parents leaves the question “Is my child safe at school?” wide open. Reassurances that “things” (we can’t tell you what) are being “done” (we can’t tell you how) may work once or twice. But after the third incident, vague assurances that the school has it under control don’t resonate when you have a list of examples of “things” not being remotely under control.
When Damien got hurt by his best friend, his mom reached out to me immediately to ask if Damien was ok and exchange notes about what we were hearing at home. We were both concerned about our sons’ friendship, which we knew to be meaningful. Two weeks later, I received an intervention report telling me that Damien had served his best friend with a platter of insults ranging from degrading to plain mean. It was so bad, the incident report had to bleep a couple of words like b****. It was my turn to be on the mortified side of the text exchange. Two nine-year-olds learning to get along.
I have conflicting feelings about the wisdom of not involving families in school incidents. Since my oldest child started school almost 25 years ago, I noticed a consistent march towards reducing parental involvement in school matters. Schools are no longer anchors in their community, they are more like black boxes. Their facilities are no longer used for community sports and events. Parents are no longer welcome to volunteer in the classroom. If you go on a field trip, you have to use your own car, not the school bus. As a parent, I often feel like an interloper.
I have children with learning disabilities, cognitive challenges and mental illness. This tends to make them more likely to be bullied, more likely to retaliate in inappropriate ways, more likely to go through periods of school avoidance, and less likely to turn in homework on time and on budget. As a result, I receive a lot of reports from school. My input is never sought: when the school reaches out to me, it’s to inform me of what they are doing. Attempts to explain, contextualize, or prevent disciplinary actions that will be counter-productive or add fuel to the fire are at best acknowledged but often ignored and never considered.
I once heard — when my older kids were in elementary school, at the dawn of the millennia — that parents of victims shouldn’t try to reach out to parents of bullies because bullying is learned at home. Maybe that’s why school staff treats the parents of children who act out like they are part of the problem instead of the solution. Today, I have a more nuanced view of the matter, having been on both sides of bullying. It is true that violence and intimidation are learned behaviours but it doesn’t follow that they were learned from parents. Children who turn to violence and intimidation were often victims first. Many of them learned to use violence, intimidation and manipulation from how they were treated by an older sibling. Many of them learned the behaviour at school, at the hands of their peers, in a myriad of little incidents unnoticed or unaddressed by overwhelmed school staff. If parents are angry when they receive an intervention report, may I suggest that it is due to pent-up helplessness and frustration at a system that didn’t reach out until their struggling kid hurt someone else?
Children who are not ok at school are not ok at home either. Parents need help and support, not a lecture.
As a short-term supply teacher, I spent a few months of casual employment observing first-hand the psycho-social consequences of the pandemic confinement on children. Some cohorts were locked down at more sensitive times than others and were affected accordingly. The kids who started kindergarten in 2023 were born in 2019 and missed out on playgroups, mom-and-me activities, daycare, and family gathering in their first two years of life. Their language is delayed and their boundaries are either a mile high or completely missing. They are universally lacking in problem-solving and social skills.
Kids who started grades 8-9 in 2023 were locked down in grade 5-6 and started middle school online, missing out on the chance to renew their social circles. Kept encased in their elementary school identities, they are still struggling to shed their dead skins. They are at the bulwark of the youth mental illness pandemic, paralyzed by social anxiety, turning on themselves to finish the job our institutions started when they locked them down to protect their grandparents’ rights to shop and play golf. They have internalized our society’s lack of care and concern for their health and education, too young to realize it was never about them.
Kids who started grade 11-12 in 2023 were locked down in middle school and were not dupe. They saw clearly what adults were doing to them. Today, they are angry and disengaged. They saw us at our worst, fearful, anxious, incapable of taking the next right step during the pandemic. They saw us congeal into close minded islands, polarized by online actors while lamenting their online addiction. They learned too young that adults are emotionally stunted teenagers with jobs, mortgages and marriages. They saw our humanity at an age when they still needed superheroes and they can’t unsee it now.
I understand the need for confidentiality but it isolates families who need to know that they are not alone. It places overworked and understaffed schools as the only point of contact, mediator and adjudicator of conflicts they are unable to manage. Everyone is suffering.
I once heard that what we injure in relationships must be healed in relationships. Isolation was the poison, connection will be the cure.